Tomorrow is the last day of Routemaster operation on route 19 between Battersea and Finsbury Park. I took a ride on the 19 last week, just because I can't next week. They've already started the changeover, so I had to wait beside Battersea Bridge for 15 minutes while a couple of dull modern double deckers emerged from the old shed that doubles as a bus garage. But then I nabbed the top deck front seat view on the next vintage vehicle for a snail's pace crawl across Central London, and suddenly the wait was worthwhile. We got stuck in a jam in Knightsbridge for 20 minutes, but (unlike next week) the Japanese tourists sitting to my right were still able to hop off the open platform and escape. We paraded up Shaftesbury Avenue which, until tomorrow night at least, is the only road in Central London where every bus is still a Routemaster. We transported some Chelsea nobs to the art galleries up Piccadilly and we delivered a smiling kid with an Incredibles balloon (and her dad) to the estates of Highbury. At least four different middle-aged blokes took our photograph as we passed. During the journey the conductor's memory failed him and he asked to check my ticket twice, although admittedly the two occasions were over an hour apart. I sincerely hope he has a job lined up for next week, but somehow I doubt it.
For the second half of the journey I got to share my top deck view with a bus fanatic and a genuine minor celebrity. The minor celeb was BBC London 94.9FM weekend breakfast DJ Simon Lederman. You've probably never heard of him, and neither had I, but his name was written on an envelope and Google is a wonderful thing. Simon had an on-board rendezvous with the bus fanatic to collect some prize tickets to give away on air for a special Open Day being arranged by Cobham Bus Museum this weekend. He also got to check the Radio London advert in the Open Day programme and got shown all the spelling mistakes in the accompanying advertising leaflet. I'm afraid that Simon's on-bus conversation was rather more interesting than the first 10 minutes of his show last Saturday, but that's local talk radio for you.
If you want to see some fine old buses in action, you could chug down to Surrey on Sunday. Or you could just stay in town and ride a Routemaster for £1.20, while you still can. There are several guest vehicles serving the 19 tomorrow, if you're interested. But there'll be just five routes left to choose from after tomorrow, and none at all before the year is out. Ride now while stocks last.
StillRoutemastering: 14 Putney - Tottenham Court Road (last day of operation: 22 July 2005) 22 Putney - Piccadilly Circus (last day of operation: 22 July 2005) 159 Marble Arch - Streatham (last day of operation: 30 September 2005) 38 Victoria - Clapton (no final date set, but likely to be replaced by bendy buses in October) 13 Golders Green - Aldwych (no final date set, but will go before Christmas)
Words fail me. So, instead of coming up with some (c)hip hop lyrics of my own, I've reappropriated some old songs in the hope of making a tidy sum myself. Well, it beats eating the burgers.
Takeaway That - Relight My Frier Donna Summer - McBurger Park Los Del Rio - BigMacarena Madness - Bagel Trousers Fleetwood BigMac - Little Fries Martha and the McMuffins - Echo Belch Bobby McFlurry - Don't Worry, Eat Happy Meal Deep Fried Something - Breakfast McMuffin At Tiffany's Sarah Brightman - I Lost My Heart To A Quarter Pounder John Travolta & Olivia Newton John - Grease Is The Word
I'm sure you can do better (I recommend this search engine to help you) and maybe you'll find a song about artery-clogging that I missed. Suggestions in the comments box please.
50 really dull things I did yesterday: woke up before my alarm, poured milk over some cereal, brewed a cup of tea, had a very warm bath, ironed a shirt, took three attempts to tie my tie to the right length, brushed my teeth, shivered, observed leaf growth on the conker tree outside Bow Road station, jumped on a train just before the doors shut, got a seat on the Central Line (it must be the school holidays), walked up a very long escalator, smiled inanely at the security guard at work, got a drink of water from the machine, finished all the day's urgent work by 10am, looked out of the window, reorganised all the emails in my inbox, sneezed, got another drink of water from the machine, planned stuff I could have left until June, pretended to look busy, went out for a sandwich, found nothing of interest in a bookshop, ate a sandwich at my desk, got another drink of water from the machine, refiled some paperwork, sharpened a pencil, looked out of the window again, reorganised my intray, watched the clock, filled the shredder, waited for the end of the working day, smiled inanely at another security guard, bought next week's Radio Times, got another seat on the Central line, took two minutes to untangle my headphones, arrived home in broad daylight, found a takeaway menu in my letterbox, threw it away, brewed a cup of tea, grilled some pork chops on the George Foreman grill you lot suggested I buy, failed to set my video properly because the clock was still on GMT, reset the clock, ate an apple, watched the rain drip down the windowpane, brewed another cup of tea, watched an old That's Life show on BBC4 (there's Spitting Image and Blott On The Landscape tonight), brushed my teeth, snuggled up in bed, looked forward to a more thrilling Wednesday.
Ten years ago today the East End came to a halt for the funeral of Ronnie Kray. The gangland boss suffered a heart attack in Broadmoor at the age of 61 and died in Wexham Park Hospital a couple of days later. Poor bloke - not even a convicted psychopath deserves to die in Slough. Ronnie's body was taken, after a post mortem, to the funeral parlour of W English and Son in the Bethnal Green Road, from where his final journey began on the afternoon of 29th March 1995. Thousands gathered in the surrounding streets to see the funeral procession, either to pay their last respects or for a final sneaky look at an East End legend. Reggie's coffin was placed in a glass-sided hearse, pulled by six plumed horses and overflowing with floral tributes. The cortege halted briefly just round the corner in Vallance Road outside the site of the twins' former home, although the original two-up two-down at number 178 no longer stood as it had been rebuilt as community housing. And from here it was just a few short yards up the road beside the railway viaduct to the church where the funeral service was to be held.
St Matthew's Church stands alone in the middle of a postwar housing estate, a beacon of brown on a patch of green surrounded by grey. There's been a church here for 250 years, although the increasingly multicultural nature of the surrounding area suggests that it may not last as a functional place of worship for very much longer. I paid a visit last week, wandering through the churchyard past dogwaste bins and teenagers gulping underage alcohol. Peering through the church's glass front door I saw a bright modern interior with a few wooden chairs gathered in the middle of a empty polished floor. It was hard to imagine, but ten years ago the church was completely packed out.
Ronnie's funeral was a massive East End affair. They played "My Way" during the service, as well as the rather schmaltzier "I Will Always Love You". The churchyard was full of shaven headed thugs, suited and booted for one day only. Four gangsters from rival 'firms', including Ronnie's brother Charlie, came together to act as pallbearers. Barbara Windsor and Morrissey sent wreaths, while another floral tribute was thought to be from the New York Mafia. But it was surviving twin Reggie who stole the limelight by attending handcuffed to a prison warder, having been let out of Maidstone for the day. He looked old and he looked distraught, but he was still happy enough to give interviews for local TV news. Perhaps he realised he'd be back here soon enough, this time inside the box (and he was, five years later, for a repeatperformance).
After the service the funeral procession headed east towards Chingford Cemetery where Ronnie was to be buried beside his beloved mother. 26 black Daimlers followed the hearse at an equine walking pace, causing gridlock through the streets of the East End. And they took a most indirect route to the cemetery, heading out across the Bow flyover (and past my house). But then legend has it that the Kray twins buried the body of Frank "Mad Axeman" Mitchell in the concrete supports of the Bow Flyover while it was under construction in 1967, so maybe Ronnie was having the last laugh after all.
Develop sudden and inexplicable urge to redecorate house Drive to well known DIY superstore on outskirts of town Spend fortune on paint, paintbrushes, mysterious tool for erecting shelves and some more paint just in case Drive 100 yards to other end of car park to visit garden centre Buy lots of ready-grown plants at extortionate prices Stop off at furniture warehouse to be enticed by new sofa Drive 20 miles to nearest IKEA, only discover that everyone else in your area has had the same idea Walk through store at a snail's pace, picking up several must-have items along the way, then join endless queue at checkout Attempt to park car in crowded loading area, then struggle to fit large flatpack box through door Drive home cautiously, unable to see through rear window Make a start on redecorating the living room by tearing down quarter of the old wallpaper and painting a narrow strip of magnolia Drill gratuitous hole in wall where new shelving unit might be located Realise that this is a very big job and wish you hadn't started it Attempt to assemble IKEA flatpack furniture, but give up after an hour and a half of swearing Look out into garden where nature has reawoken uncontrollably after her winter sleep Divert attention to pulling up weeds, cutting back shrubs and oiling the lawnmower Get barbecue out, despite it not quite being warm enough for one yet Continue to fill binbags with leftover foliage while coals fail to catch light Go back inside as darkness falls and fall asleep on sofa Wake up on Tuesday morning ready to go back to real work Wait until next bank holiday weekend and repeat
Easter Eggs hunt: Here are clues to 20 words that sound like they start with 'eggs', but don't. Each clue has two parts - a definition of the complete word and a definition of the non-eggs part of the word. For example, "shout demand" would be eggsclaim and "modify swap" would be eggschange. How many can you identify?
1) praise levy 2) eject island 3) destroy end 4) outclass flog 5) trade games 6) reveal model 7) quality sword 8) surpass spore 9) rouse location 10) tax dimensions
Ahh, that's better. Saturday teatime, curtains closed, BBC1, and that familiar diddly-dum diddly-dum theme tune filling the airwaves. I even went to the effort of travelling 100 miles so that I could watch the whole programme from my parents' sofa, although it was positioned rather too close to the wall for me to be able to hide behind it at the appropriate moments. My initial thoughts were that the programme was bland and derivative, full of grinning monsters in spandex with shiny teeth, but then I realised I'd tuned in 15 minutes too early and was watching Graham Norton in Strictly Dance Fever by mistake. But I needn't have worried because the actual programme was dramatic, original, engrossing and witty, just the way proper Doctor Who used to be.
As an echo to the past, new assistant Rose lived on a dreary council estate somewhere in London, though they filmed her local scenes on a glorious day in summer when even a concrete wasteland could look endearing. She worked in a non-existent department store in London where she came face to face with the walking plastic shop dummies that haunted my youth. Her world was turned upside-down by the arrival of a grinning Mancunian in a battered leather jacket, whose history she uncovered via a search engine (do check out the genuine webpage, it's brilliant). Her cowardly boyfriend was replaced by a grinning plastic replica, though (like so many relationships) it was often hard to spot the difference. And she helped to defeat a shapeless alien living in an industrial vat beneath the London Eye, saving the planet (and her outrageous mother) in the process. No wonder she wanted to run away from it all in the Tardis by the end of the episode. All the classic ingredients were there, mixed with wonder and a little magic, and I was duly relieved that I loved every second of it.
I would like to discuss the new series of Doctor Who later this afternoon with my ten year old nephew, him being target audience and all that, except that he exists in a Murdoch TV bubble so he almost certainly wasted his Saturday evening watching Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragonball Z instead. If you missed the first episode of the new series too, you can catch it repeated on BBC3 tonight at 7pm. But maybe you'll want to put the wheelie bin out first.
Who's London Spearhead From Space (September 1970)
The first Doctor Who story I ever remember watching was Jon Pertwee's first - this delightful tale where plastic objects suddenly spring to life. Just my luck to start watching in time for one of the scariest scenes ever, the one where plastic dummies burst out of shop windows and shoot innocent passing members of the public. One minute people were going about their everyday shopping, the next they were gunned down by lumbering mannequins with firearms concealed within their drop-down wrists. How was a five year old supposed to face shopping in the local high street after that?
Still, at least my local high street wasn't Ealing Broadway where these particular scenes were filmed. I paid my very first visit to Ealing last Saturday afternoon in an attempt to lay my childhood demons to rest. The shop I came to see was John Sanders, a traditional department store from the era before bland corporate retailing. No stranger to disaster, the building had survived a direct hit from a V1 bomb during World War Two 25 years before its glass was again shattered during the Auton Invasion of 1970. But John Sanders couldn't hold out as an independent retailer forever and so its mythical shop window now belongs to Marks and Spencer instead. And there are still dummies in it.
Looks evil, doesn't she? She's one of the three mannequins still keeping watch over the unsuspecting people of Ealing Broadway, staring through faceless eyes out across the pelican crossing towards Christ The Saviour church. Three more dummies lurk just inside the M&S entrance, bedecked in red 'sale' t-shirts, awaiting the signal that will snap them back to life. Because, haven't you heard, the Autons are invading again, tonight at 7pm. This time it's Oxford Street that's going to be attacked, but don't worry because a new Doctor will be on hand to save the day (and to lure one of the shop assistants off to a new life). I'm delighted not just that the show is returning but that script writer RussellTDavies has chosen to relaunch the new series using my very first Doctor Who nightmares. And I really hope that, next Saturday, there'll be small five year old boys walking down Ealing Broadway keeping an especially tight hold on their parent's hand, just in case that nearby shop window shatters and the invasion begins for real.
The very last Doctor Who episode was set in London, just like the very first. It wasn't meant to be the very last episode, it just turned out that way when the Doctor finally met his match in the form of evil programme controller Michael Grade. Had the production team known that this was the end of the line, I suspect they'd have wrapped up the show somewhere slightly more glamorous than the streets of Perivale. But I guess it was kind of appropriate to end somewhere suburban, somewhere ordinary, somewhere London.
Perivale is very London. John Betjeman described the place as a "parish of enormous hayfields", but you'd be hard pushed to agree with him today. Now it's a patch of 1930s semis built alongside the A40, just west of the Hanger Lane gyratory system. Perivale's most famous landmark is probably the Art Deco HooverBuilding, a Grade 1 listed white structure now sympathetically converted to a Tesco hypermarket. It's even lit up emerald green at night, just to show how much loved it is. But that's about as thrilling as Perivale gets. There is the Grand Union Canal, and the Central line and a huge Royal Mail sorting office, and even a very big hill (of which more later). But Perivale is mostly houses.
This is the house on the corner of Bleasdale Avenue and Colwyn Avenue, outside which the Tardis materialised at the start of the final Doctor Who story. We're on the Medway estate, a well-kept network of mock tudor semis and desirable council housing complete with spring blossom and multi-car ownership. In the TV series these leafy avenues were supposed to be where Ace grew up, popping down to the shops on Medway Parade and hanging out in the recreation ground opposite the station. Here the feline Cheetah People struck, carting off the local adolescents to hunt as prey on their distant homeworld. I watched as a silent milkfloat hummed by, and shuddered slightly as a small cat stopped to look at me from the pavement. All wonderfully ordinary, just like the streets where I grew up, and so typical of Doctor Who to place the terrifying slap bang in the middle of the mundane.
The final scenes of the final show were shot atop Perivale's highest point, the summit of Horsenden Hill. It's a beautiful wooded peak of green contours, rising unspoilt above the surrounding housing estates. I climbed the wooded path from the hump-back bridge by the canal, arriving halfway up in a grassy clearing populated by shifty-looking semi-clad blokes. At the summit four boys were kicking a football around while their mothers sat patiently waiting for them to run out of steam. I stood for a while to take in the fantastic views over West London, including the new Wembley arch rising to the east. I liked the place rather more than I thought I was going to, but I'm still glad that by 7pm tomorrow evening this attractive hilltop will no longer be the site of the final Doctor Who episode.
"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on Ace, we've got work to do."
The very first Doctor Who episode was set in London, supposedly somewhere around Shoreditch, which just goes to show how before-its-time the show was even then. The show opened with an atmospheric shot of a dimly-lit junkyard. What was that mysterious looking police box doing there in Totters Lane, and why was it humming? The scene then switched to a nearby secondary school where we were introduced to the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan, and to her teachers Ian and Barbara. Two key Doctor Who locations... or they would have been if only the first episode hadn't been filmed entirely in the studio. There is no such London street as Totters Lane, let alone a Foreman's junkyard at number 76, neither is there a Coal Hill School anywhere in the Ofsted database. But I still managed to find them both, within a mile of each other in west London, thanks to two stories that revisited these locations more than 20 years later.
76 Totters Lane The Doctor returned to Foreman's junkyard in 1985, as part of the two-part story Attack of the Cybermen (UK Gold, Saturday, 3:10pm). Colin Baker and assistant Peri parked the Tardis here before setting off to tackle a gang of diamond thieves in the London sewers, like you do. The junkyard scene was only brief, but it provided a geographical location for the original 1963 series, and nowhere near Shoreditch. This is Becklow Road in Acton, London W12, at the crossroads with Cobbold Road and Gayford Road. It's a quiet residential backwater surrounded by old Victorian terraces. All old, that is, except for the one glaringly new block of flats you can see in my photo. Closer inspection confirms that these redbrick apartments have been built (at some time during the last 20 years) on the precise site where the filming of 76 Totters Lane took place. Residents do normal things here now, oblivious of the site's former history, things like watching television, doing the hoovering and not running away from Cybermen. The old junkyard has vanished forever... unless you've got a time machine, of course.
Coal Hill School This old school building, by contrast, looks just the same as it did when Sylvester McCoy screeched to a halt outside in the search for renegade Daleks. It's a big old Victorian school building, just off the main shopping street in Hammersmith, with separate entrances for "Boys", "Girls" and "Infants". In 1988 this was the home of St John's School, dressed up for the series as Coal Hill School (1963). The headteacher was the actor who played Mr Bronson, the playground had alien scorchmarks on the tarmac and, most importantly of all, this was the place where Daleks first demonstated they could travel up stairs. But in 2005 there's no school here any more. The northern half of the building is now the Macbeth Centre, the local Adult Education base where you can do courses in feng shui, pilates, welding and web design (but not time travel). And the southern half of the building is now a key stage 4 pupil referral unit for excluded pupils. Exactly the sort of place where troublesome Ace might have ended up... as indeed she did, smashing the chemistry lab to smithereens with her baseball bat before the whole room exploded. Evidence suggests that today's troubled teenagers are rather more well behaved.
I don't know whether you've noticed, but DoctorWho is back on our TV screens this Saturday after a 16-year hiatus. The return of this sci-fi classic will either fill you with nostalgic childlike joy, or leave you reaching for the remote in total indifference. For the next few days, I'm hoping it's the former.
With the entire infinite universe at his disposal, the Doctor instead chose to spend an inordinate amount of his time on just one small blue-green planet - our own Earth. Careful scrutiny of videotape records narrows down his particular interest to protecting the UK from imminent alien invasion and, more specifically, in safeguarding residents living within five miles of BBC Television Centre. A surprisingly high proportion of the Doctor's adventures took place in the capital and, as if to make the point, the first episode of the newseries is set here too (somewhere on the number 16 bus route). OK, so the latest stuff was actually filmed in Cardiff with the help of a few hijacked Routemasters, but many of the old stories really were shot in London, just for added realism. I spent last Saturday visiting a handful of these choice locations, just to see what's left after Who's gone. First location report tomorrow.
In the meantime, courtesy of this splendid (but now defunct) website, here's a rundown of Doctor Who's London film locations.
William Hartnell (1963-66) • The Dalek Invasion of Earth(filmed August 1964): Classic shots of Daleks in Trafalgar Square, rolling along the Embankment and perching on top of the Albert Memorial (how did they get up the steps?) • The Massacre(filmed January 1966): New companion Dodo runs inside what she thinks is a police box, near the windmill on Wimbledon Common. • The War Machines(filmed May 1966): The Doctor discovers that the new Post Office Tower is in fact the base of an evil computer bent on taking over the world.
Patrick Troughton (1966-69) • The Invasion(filmed September 1968): Cybermen crawl out of the sewers and invade the capital (including that iconic shot of silver-suited robots walking down the steps in front of St Paul's Cathedral.
Jon Pertwee (1970-74) • Spearhead From Space(filmed September 1969): Shop window dummies spring to life in Ealing High Street. • The Terror of the Autons(filmed September 1970): The Master's first appearance, in a circus tent on land now covered by the Lea Bridge Ice Centre, Leyton. • The Mind of Evil(filmed November 1970): Exterior shots of UNIT headquarters are shot in Cornwall Gardens, South Kensington. • Day of the Daleks(filmed September 1971): Ogrons emerge from a time tunnel underneath Bull's Bridge, Hayes, Middlesex. • Invasion of the Dinosaurs(filmed 1973): The Doctor parks his Whomobile outside a deserted Moorgate station, only to be hemmed in by a stegosaurus.
Tom Baker (1974-81) • Terror of the Zygons(filmed March 1975): The Loch Ness Monster emerges from the River Thames beside Lambeth Bridge, beneath Millbank Tower. • The Talons of Weng-Chiang(filmed December 1976): Seminal Victorian East London fogbound mystery adventure, featuring Clink Street, St Katherine's Dock and Wapping Old Stairs. • Logopolis(filmed December 1980): The Tardis materialises on Cadogan Pier beneath Albert Bridge, where The Watcher is standing guard.
Peter Davison (1981-84) • Mawdryn Undead(filmed August 1982): The Brigadier has become a maths teacher at a minor public school, located in Trent Park, Enfield (just north of Cockfosters station). • Resurrection of the Daleks(filmed September 1983): The deserted warehouses to the east of Tower Bridge turn out to be full of Daleks (and not yet trendy restaurants).
Colin Baker (1984-86) • Attack of the Cybermen(filmed May 1984): Those evil silver creatures swarm all over some obscure backstreets across Acton, including a certain junkyard that turns out to be where the series began.
Sylvester McCoy (1987-89) • Remembrance of the Daleks(filmed April 1988): The Doctor goes back to school (off Hammersmith High Street) and uncovers the Hand of Omega in a grave in a cemetery in Kilburn (the same one where my great-grandfather is buried). • Survival(filmed June 1989): The final story of the final series sees Cheetah People invading a sleepy Perivale estate.
Isn't Easter early this year? Well yes it is, actually. Easter only falls in March about 22% of the time. More specifically Easter only falls on, or before, March 27th about 10% of the time. If you want a really early Easter you need to wait another three years, because Easter 2008 falls as early as March 23rd (which is stunningly rarely early). But even March 23rd isn't the earliest date that Easter can fall, because that's today, March 22nd. And here's why.
Easter Day falls "on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox". This year the springequinox was last Sunday, the next full moon is this Friday, and that makes Easter Day next Sunday. Simple (ish). Except that the church doesn't use the real spring equinox, it uses the date of the spring equinox in 325AD (which was March 20th). And the church doesn't use the real full moon, it uses an approximate one called the Paschal Full Moon, with dates that repeat every 19 years. If (and only if) this Paschal Full Moon falls on Saturday March 21st, then Easter Day can be as early as Sunday March 22nd. I'll leave the full explanation to others (here), but the upshot is that Easter Day can fall on any date from March 22nd (today) to April 25th (5 weeks time) inclusive.
Here's a list of really early Easters, so you can see how rare they really are: • Easter on 27th March: last happened 1932, next happens 2016 (but then not again until 2157) • Easter on 26th March: last happened 1989, next happens 2062 • Easter on 25th March: last happened 1951, next happens 2035 • Easter on 24th March: last happened 1940, next happens 2391 [falls on or before this date only 3% of the time] • Easter on 23rd March: last happened 1913, next happens 2008 [falls on or before this date only 1½% of the time] • Easter on 22nd March: last happened 1818, next happens 2285 [falls on this date only ½% of the time]
10 fantastically geeky Easter date links:••••••••••
A touch of Jason: As I predicted, the screening of ITV's comedy drama Diamond Geezer on Sunday night brought Googlers rushing to this page in large numbers. They started trickling in during the show, rising to a flood at 11pm as the final credits rolled, and they've been gushing in ever since. Apparently the programme had 9.4 million viewers, of whom only a tiny proportion have ended up here, but I still had more visitors in one day yesterday than I've ever had in any day before. Moral of story: If you want lots of traffic, name your blog after a TV drama icon. For example: I suspect that renaming your blog "Doctor Who" might pay huge dividends next weekend...
Britain's most well-loved comedy actor returns to our television screens tonight in another award-winning role of genius. DavidJason stars in DiamondGeezer (ITV1 9pm) as an old lag who masterminds an audacious jewel robbery from the comfort of his cosy prison cell. It's sure to be a two hour drama masterpiece, adored by the non-demanding Sunday night audience, and if we're really lucky a heartwarming series will follow. Because, if there's one thing thing you can never accuse lovable rogue David Jason of, it's typecasting.
1940: Born David John White in Edmonton, son of Arthur (a Billingsgate fish porter) and Olwen (a charlady). 1955: Leaves school to work as an apprentice mechanic. Joins amateur dramatic company. 1965: First professional acting role, in a Noel Coward play for Bromley Rep (replacing his brother Arthur who leaves to take an acting role in Z Cars). 1967: TV debut alongside Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Jones in Do Not Adjust Your Set (a forerunner of Monty Python's Flying Circus). 1969: Jason (briefly) plays a gardener in Crossroads (surely the pinnacle of his career). 1973: Ronnie Barker makes a series of seven one-off comedy dramas for the BBC, and invites Jason to play bumbling shop assistant Granville in Open All Hours. Another of the seven dramas later becomes Porridge, in which Jason is cast as elderly inmate Blanco. 1976: Open All Hours is turned into a much-loved series, which will be used to plug the gaps in early evening BBC schedules for several years to come. 1981: Jason makes his debut as lovable rogue Del Boy Trotter in the seminal Peckham-based sitcom, Only Foolsand Horses. Sales of Reliant Robins soar. 1981: Immortalised as the voice of DangerMouse in DangerMouse. 1987: Wins BAFTA for portrayal of grumpy college porter Skullion in Porterhouse Blue. 1988: Immortalised as the voice of Count Duckula in CountDuckula. 1989: Plays bluff Yorkshire businessman Ted Simcock in David Nobbs' A Bit Of A Do 1991: ITV offers Jason the 'perfick' role of Pop Larkin in The Darling Buds of May, thereby making him the first old codger in the life of Catherine Zeta-Jones. 1992: ITV realises that Inspector Morse can't go on forever, so Jason is drafted in to play a grumpy detective in A Touch Of Frost (which proceeds to go on forever). 1999: The BBC shows the comedy clip of Del Boy falling through the Only Fools and Horses bar for the 500th time. 2002: Jason writes and stars in The Quest, a homely nostalgic drama for ITV. 2003: Awarded a BAFTA Fellowship for being the most much-loved actor in the history of television, ever. 2005: Right up-to date with prison drama Diamond Geezer which, if nothing else, will bring Googlers flooding to this page by mistake.
• Red jam tart Line large aluminium tray with pastry, open catering-sized tin of red jam, spread really really thinly over base, add a couple of twisty pastry strips to add depth, bake in large school oven, cut into small rectangles, serve.
• Chocolate Concrete Melt 250g margarine in saucepan, add 300g plain flour, 150g demerara sugar and 25g cocoa, press into greased tin, prick the top and bake at gas mark 5 for 30-40 minutes, brush with water, sprinkle with castor sugar.
• Prunes and custard Fill large vat with milk and custard powder, leave to bubble overnight until lumps appear, add pink blancmange for colour (optional), ladle into battered serving jugs, wait until skin depth has reached 2mm; meanwhile share out huge can of prunes into several metal trays, dump unceremoniously on table, force children to eat, watch them sob.
• Butterscotch tart Melt 250g butter on low heat, add 200ml milk and 500g brown sugar, stir until dissolved, whisk in 2 heaped tablespoons of flour, reduce heat when mixture thickens, pour onto pre-cooked pastry base, wait to cool.
• Rice pudding Wait until children have finished their free milk at morning break, ask milk monitors to bring crates to school kitchen, pour leftover liquid into cauldron, add marble-sized rice grains, simmer on low heat until tepid, serve with dollop of jam.
• Gypsy tart Whisk together 400g tin of evaporated milk and 350g sugar for 10 minutes until light and fluffy and coffee coloured, pour mix into shortcrust pastry case, bake at gas mark 6 for 10 minutes, serve cold.
• Pigswill Line large bin with black bag, place near exit to school canteen, wait.
The world is split into two distinct camps - those who like rugby and those who don't. I spent yesterday at a meeting in the company of both worlds. Over a lunchtime tray of bland corporate sandwiches the conversation suddenly turned to this weekend's Six Nations tournament. Half of those present discussed the imminent international confrontations with passion and fervour. They knew which teams were doing well and which players were on form. They discussed scrummage tactics and fly half potential. They bemoaned England's post-World-Cup decline and they knew precisely how long it had been since Wales' last Grand Slam success. In short, they actually cared about who would win what on Saturday. The rest of us merely shut up and listened, unable to contribute, secretly hoping that the conversation might revert to something more inclusive.
I've always hated rugby. To be honest I probably didn't realise it existed before I was 11, because my enlightened primary school played (proper) football instead. OK, so I may have been rubbish at playing that too, but at least my life wasn't in danger every time I had a PE lesson. My secondary school, alas, believed that rugger was the one true sport. I spent every winter for five years freezing to death in a stripy jersey while boys who'd already hit puberty wrestled with each other in muddy puddles. I tried hard to keep out of the way, in case the ball might accidentally be thrown in my direction and a horde of lumbering animals launch themselves on top of me. I cowered every time I was selected for the scrum in case some crucial body part of mine be squashed or wrenched off in the grunting mêlée. And I scored a try only once, when my sadistic PE teacher noticed me standing beside the touch line and threw me the ball, no doubt expecting me to fumble it and then be crushed in a pile of adolescent limbs. He was disappointed, but only on this one single miserable occasion.
And yet some people live and breathe rugby. They follow Harlequins or Saracens with a fervent zeal, like other people might follow Arsenal or Chelsea. They wouldn't dream of actually playing in a match but they love to spectate, shout and sing rude songs, usually while wearing oversized replica jerseys. They read sports pages I never even skim, trying to keep track as their favourite players fall foul of serious ligament injury. They'll even travel business class to international matches at Murrayfield or Lansdowne Road, presumably as an excuse to get away from the wife for a few glorious pissed-up weekends every year. All this for a game which they no doubt would describe as elegant, but which to me looks like two teams of lardarses beating the hell out of each other egged on by an adoring middle class fanbase.
And then there's rugby league. To a namby pamby southerner like me this game is a complete irrelevance, barely afforded media space. It's a scarily regional phenomenon, of minimal interest to anyone living more than 20 miles away from the M62. I think there are less people in a team, and they play throughout the summer, and they have stupid team names dangerously similar to American baseball, but I'm not certain. I encountered league frenzy when I lived in Hull for a year, which felt somewhat like being surrounded by disciples of an alternative religion. But then I'm a complete rugby atheist anyway, as you'll have gathered. My apologies if you care who wins in the Six Nations tomorrow, but this says nothing to me about my life. You may try, but I am not converted.
As you know, StPatrick'sDay is the most important day in the entire history of Ireland. But how much do you really know about this ancient and traditional festival? Can you separate fact from drunken myth? Take my simple quiz, then click to find out.
1)Who was St Patrick?a) b) c) a) A leprechaun from the banks of the river Shannon b) U2's original bass guitarist c) A Roman slave who became the first Irish Pope
2)Why is St Patrick famous?a) b) c) a) He invented Guinness in the 6th century b) He banned boa constrictors from entering Ireland c) It was his idea to paint the Blarney Stone green
3)What happens on St Patrick's Day?a) b) c) a) Everyone in Ireland gets very drunk b) Everyone all around the world pretends to be Irish and gets very drunk c) Ken Livingstone pretends to be Irish and gets London very drunk (four days early)
4)What is the national dress of Ireland?a) b) c) a) A tall green hat with bells on it b) A large flappy felt comedy shamrock c) Pointy buckled shoes and a ginger beard
5)What is Ireland's most famous export?a) b) c) a) RiverDancing - gyration as if paralysed from the waist up b) The Craic - a 'class A' narcotic grin shared by friends c) Ryanair - the cheapest way to get nowhere fast
6)Where do 95% of Irish people live?a) b) c) a) In tumbledown cottages next to potato fields b) In Dublin's fair city c) In America
7)Who is the most famous Irishman?a) b) c) a) Father Ted - Roman Catholic Archbishop of all Eire b) Oscar Bernard Joyce, who wrote "The Importance of Pygmalion's Wake" c) B Jesus
8)Are Irish stereotypes offensive?a) b) c) a) Begorrah, to be sure b) Don't get in a paddy about it c) Shut up and carry on drinking
That Jamie Oliver has been doing sterling work on TV recently (final programme tonight) showing up modern school dinners for the fat-soaked nutrient-free snacks that they really are. Rich greedy cateringcompanies spend a mere 37p a head serving up cheap fried horrors to the nation's children, and we allow them to get away with it. It's truly scandalous.
We never had this problem when I was a kid. No turkey twizzlers or fishy shapes were served up in the good old days, oh no. My daily dinner money was nearer 15p, and for that I got a plateful of real food, lovingly produced on the premises by battleaxes in pink hairnets. There was no such thing as choice back then - I either ate what I was given or I was forced to eat it anyway. And it never did my waistline any harm (not when I was a kid anyway).
So today I'm proposing a new culinary revolution in the world of school catering. None of this namby-pamby organic vegetarian rubbish that Mr Oliver is proposing to foist on the nation's youth. Instead we should return to core food values, back to nutritional basics and revert to the heritage school dinners of old. If it was good enough to stave off rickets in the 1960s and 70s, it's got to be good enough to feed obese lardbucket kids today. Here's my proposed fortnightly menu:
Week 1 Monday
Week 1 Tuesday
Week 1 Wednesday
Week 1 Thursday
Week 1 Friday
Macaroni cheese.
Jam sponge with coconut sprinkles, lumpy custard.
Liver and bacon, boiled potatoes, shredded cabbage.
Bow Road station update: It's exactly a year since Bow Road station was first closed at 10pm every night so that renovation work could (supposedly) take place. A year of early closures, and a year of me having to take a longer route home whenever I've been out late. Had I been mugged on the walk back, which thankfully I wasn't, maybe I could have sued. But in the last fortnight, all of a sudden with absolutely no publicity whatsoever, the station's opening hours have been returned to normal. Trains are now pulling into a very different Bow Road station to that which used to exist a year ago. Take a look.
This used to be a dark, gloomy platform with peeling paint on the walls and a grimy low ceiling. It was unappealing, uninviting and seriously unlookedafter. For eleven months its grubby surface was covered by a makeshift blue wall, screening the leisurely metamorphosis behind. And now, with the protective shell removed, this place has been reborn as a fresh, bright platform with gleaming white panels on the walls and a slightly repainted ceiling. The opposite platform, also newly revealed, looks much the same. All of a sudden, the 21st century has arrived.
Except they promised us it wasn't going to look modern. This station upgrade was supposed to retain all of the station's key Edwardian architectural features. I'm sure they're all still there, somewhere underneath this modern veneer, but both platforms now have rather more of an 'airport terminal' feeling to them. There are little four-seater benches that wouldn't look out of place at IKEA, there's strip lighting that might be found in any office, and there's an artificial white coating covering the full length of each wall. It's even less traditional up the stairwells where giant alien globes have landed, masquerading as light fittings. And everywhere, absolutely every-bloody-where, there are all-pervasive security cameras. I suspect these are to be monitored from the brand new control room that's magically appeared off the ticket hall, which should give the station staff somewhere warm to sit and read their newspapers while they continue to ignore all the passing passengers.
The end of the long drawn-out modernisation process at Bow Road seems (at last) to be in sight. The platforms have reopened, the scaffolding is coming down and all opening restrictions have been lifted. But there's still a lot of mopping up and finishing off to be done, which could take months. And I have yet to be impressed.
Five ten-word reviews (in descending order of loveliness) • Kaiser Chiefs - Employment(album): sparkly Britpop debut, packed with quirky jewels (nod to Blur) • Smoke #5(magazine): superior capital fanzine reaches fifth edition, and better than ever • 1000 UK Number One Hits(book): expensive coffee table slab packed with essential in-depth chart-topping trivia • The Bravery - The Bravery(album): heroic opening track followed by plucky guitars (but hardly courageous) • A.N. Wilson - London: A Short History(book): concise, opinionated and informative chronology, spoilt by final up-to-date chapters
Did you invite some friends round for a curry last week to raise money to fight HIV and AIDS in India? Or were you made increasingly aware of Endometriosis, a enigmatic disease of the female reproductive system? Or did you make a special effort to investigate Jewish literature? Probably not, but last week was officially Spice Up Your Life Week, Endometriosis Awareness Week and Jewish Book Week, so maybe you should have done. The country is awash with special awareness weeks, not all of them as worthy as the three I've just mentioned. For example, October is blighted by National Sausage Week, June plays host to National BBQ Week while July sees International Bog Day. Many of these campaigns are merely shameless attempts by corporate PR departments to get us to buy something. All it takes is a headline grabbing survey, a couple of evangelical press releases and a three minute appearance on the GMTV sofa. Anybody could do it, and anybody does.
Here are ten current marketing campaigns. Seven are genuine, while three I've made up. Can you spot the fakes? (either work it out for yourself, or use the very wonderful online resource that is the Count Me In Calendar)
• National Ideas Day (14 March): A special day to focus on creativity and innovation in the workplace on the anniversary of Einstein’s birth (and, by coincidence, tomorrow there's a one-day seminar which you might like to attend). • Commonwealth Day (14 March): A well-meaning attempt to keep alive an outmoded institution by remembering people from other countries who win more Olympic medals than we do. • Water Conservation Week (14-20 March): A national campaign to encourage us not to take baths (but shower instead), not to clean our teeth (with the tap running) and not to flush the toilet (quite so often). • Obesity Awareness Week (13-19 March): Eating too much can make you wobbly, which is why TOAST (The Obesity Awareness & Solutions Trust) are launching a special National Obesity Hotline today. • National Outdoor Week (12-20 March): Apparently going outside and taking part in various outdoor leisure activities keeps you fit and healthy (although personally I think it just increases the possibility of sustaining a nasty injury and ending up in hospital). • National Science Week (11-20 March): A nationwide programme of science, engineering and technology activities - clearly organised by ignorant scientists who really ought to know that a week has seven days, not ten. • Mini Roundabout Safety Week (14-20 March): A desperate campaign to teach UK drivers how not to kill passing cyclists when confronted by a small white circle painted in the middle of a road junction. • National Bed Month (1-31 March): The annual cynical attempt by the 'Sleep Council' to persuade us to buy a new bed, usually by running a pointless survey hinting that our current bed isn't big/comfy/modern enough. • National Frozen Food Month (1-31 March): It's American, this one, based on the frankly feeble premise that "there's no better time to check out your grocery store for some of America's leading freezer favorites". • Diamond Geezer Awareness Day (14 March): A recent survey revealed that 99% of the British public have never heard of this blog, let alone read it. You can remedy this shameless state of affairs and increase levels of national optimism by linking to this site today.
There's a new blogtool on the block called MyBlogLog.com. It's a simple unobtrusive service (one line of javascript) that keeps count every time a visitor to your website clicks on one of your links. It tallies all of these clicked links and then it lists them in a daily league table. And it's fascinating. Here's what I've discovered about you.
a) You don't click much Evidence: Last week, no link got more than 20 clicks in one day (and only five links got more than 10 clicks) My blog is teeming with links. Sometimes I spend ages finding what I think are interesting and appropriate links. And then you ignore them. Obviously this is your prerogative, but maybe I shouldn't bother.
b) The more I link, the less you click Evidence: On Monday I gave you 28 new links to click on. Each received an average of only 1.7 clicks OndayswhenIshoweryouwithlinks, they drown and you barely notice them. One or two clicks each, that's all they get, from less than 1% of my readership. Hardly worth them being there.
c) The less I link, the more you click Evidence: On Friday I provided you with only three links. Each received an average of 7.7 clicks On days when I'm link-lite, each link shines like a glowing beacon in a sea of text. And so more of you click on them. Still less than 2% of my visitors click on them, though, which is still a bit feeble.
d) You're more likely to click if I ask you to Evidence: On Thursday I asked you to go and do Tom's quiz. 29 of you did. But 253 of you didn't, which is 90% of you, so that's still not very successful.
e) You like clicking on the stuff at the top of my sidebar Evidence: Over the course of a week, the five links at the top of my sidebar get an average of 18 clicks each Either you're nosey, or people arriving here for the first time are more interested in working down my sidebar than they are in the rest of what I have to write. It looks like I'm under-utilising all that dark grey space over there, and maybe I should change my listed links more often.
f) You rarely scroll down the screen to click anything Evidence: 90% of yesterday's 80 clicks were to links visible at the top of the screen As I suspected, most of the writing on my blog has a shelf life of two or three days maximum. After that it passes so far down the page that almost nobody reads it any more, and nobody clicks on it either.
g) You really don't click much Evidence: I had over 1000 unique visitors last week, but less than 900 offsite clicks My blog is teeming with links that you ignore. But that's OK, because I like linking even if you don't click. To be honest, I probably ignore most of the links on your blog too. And now you can find out, with MyBlogLog.com. It's free for the first seven days (and free forever if you stick with the basic service). Go on, it'll be fascinating. </advert>
Tried using the tube at the weekend recently? It's not easy. London Underground keep shutting down large chunks of the underground network every weekend 'due to planned engineering works', and every weekend it's a different selection of track. What may look like a simple journey across town can become a nightmare diversionary trek via rail replacement bus services once various line segments have been erased from service. Particularly badly hit at the moment are the Metropolitan and Jubilee lines in the Wembley Park area, and the District and Circle lines across the centre of town. I know that all these engineering works have to take place sometime, and that the network may even be better once they're all completed, but I'm sure we never used to have quite so many simultaneously.
To help the struggling London traveller, the tube website now kindly lists all the planned network closures for the next six months (all 135 of them). It's a rather scary list, so I've decided to summarise it in this easy-to-swallow table of weekend tube shutdowns. Every coloured blob indicates a weekend shutdown along part (or all) of a particular line. Now you can plan to be elsewhere as required (or maybe stick to the East London and Piccadilly lines, just to be on the safe side).
Going back to my roots: dead end this line terminates here
My 40th birthday has caused me to pause and ponder my mortality a little. All that research into my family tree has been fascinating, but it's also served to remind me that I am the end of the line. My brother may have done enough to ensure that the family genes and surname will head onwards into future generations, but it won't be happening through me. My genes have reached a biological cul-de-sac and they're going nowhere. My name won't be appearing in anybody else's family tree as a direct ancestor, merely as a short stubby side branch. When I'm gone (hopefully in the far distant future) all that will remain will be my influences, other people's memories and a few choice artefacts. But that's good enough for me.
So this week I have finally been nudged into sorting out a will. It's taken me long enough, and it's taken a lot of nudging, but I have at last got around to considering what will happen to my assets when I've gone. It's a problem that's all too easy to ignore because it isn't a problem until you die, and then you're not the one that has to mop up the mess. But it's a problem that's easily solved, so I've discovered. And making a will has got to be better than leaving your relatives to hang around waiting for some lawyer to apply the country's intestacy laws.
The country's intestacy laws (wildly simplified): 1) Married with kids? Money goes to spouse and kids. 2) Married without kids? Money goes to spouse, but maybe some of it to parents, or brothers and sisters, or nephews and nieces. 3) Unmarried? Keep working down the following list until you find somebody alive to give the money to: kids, parents, brothers and sisters (or nephews and nieces), grandparents, uncles and aunts (or cousins), the Crown.
One of the duties of the trustees named in my will (hello to both of you) will be to dispose of all my worldly goods. That's not just any property I may own at the time of my death, but also all the crap I have stashed away around my house. All my CDs and books and gadgets and clothes should be quite easy to deal with, but I wonder what they'll do with all the boxes that are clogging up my spare room. I own loads of stuff that I wouldn't dream of throwing out because it means something to me, but that I can't imagine anybody else would want to keep after I'm gone. What will become of my cuddly womble, or my Top Trumps cards, or all those recorded-off-the-radio cassettes, or my geography exercise books, or that 1972 London bus map, or the notes to my best man's speech, or many hundreds of other items of useless ephemera? Probably best that I'm not around to find out.
But I do hope that whoever sorts out my affairs will search carefully before they bin everything. I'd hate them to miss my grandmother's teenage autograph book, or the announcement of my father's christening in the local church magazine, or my tiny maternity ward wristband, or the Coronation edition Radio Times, or my complete set of 10 Red Nose Day red noses, amongst several other hidden treasures. Do please have a thorough rummage before you chuck the lot, won't you? Just, er, don't look in the third box down on the right, because that one's probably best burnt <cough> unopened.
40 quiz: Here are 16 clues, each with an answer that includes the number 40. Some clues are straight forward, others are soundalikes. How many 40s can you identify? For example, if this were an '80 quiz', "round the world time" would be "80 days" and "imaginative" would be "cre80ve". (Answers in the comments box)
Many thanks for your generous torrent of (double) birthday greetings yesterday. Each one was much appreciated, by both of us.
So, how does life look from the other side of 40? Exactly the same, of course. I know that I've been going on and on about reaching 40 recently, but that's because 40 is a nice round number, and I like numbers. I've not approached my 40th birthday as a milestone to fear, merely as an 'event'. It's not as if any new crowsfeet have grown overnight, or that I've started wandering around the house in slippers, or even that I've developed a sudden liking for the croonings of Michael Bublé. No, for me at least, nothing has really changed. 40 is business as usual.
But I'm not convinced that everyone else will view my 40-ness that way. In some people's eyes I've just crossed an invisible threshold, from interesting to disinterested. At the start of the week I was a thirty-something, grouped together with youngsters who were still toddling during the drought of 1976. And now I'm a forty-something, lumped in with people who were born before Bill Haley hit the charts. I really don't mind being part of either group, but I'm prepared for the age-related prejudice that some people will now cast in my direction. I'm just as attractive, just as employable and just as human as I was on Tuesday, but not everyone will see that. Their loss.
My feelings were very similar at the ages of 20 and 30, and I suspect will remain the same when I hit 50, 60 and even 70. Life is a series of imaginary barriers - targets we hope we'll never reach, but which we eventually end up viewing from the other side. As I enter my fifth decade, I'm just delighted to have got this far in one piece and to have the prospect of several more decades to come. Even if life doesn't begin at 40, the rest of mine does. Best make the most of it then.
Going back to my roots: Watford, Herts me, born 1965
And finally, back to the very spot where I was born. Not that I was born in the middle of a four lane concrete highway, you understand. It's just that during the last 40 years the Shrodells Maternity Unit has been knocked down to make way for the Watford ring road. There may still be a road sign marked 'Deliveries' by the side of the road, but this is no longer a good place to have regular contractions. I'm sure it won't surprise you to hear that I was born within 100 yards of a tubestation (or at least it was one at the time), but the green dome of the Watford Mosque was absolutely nowhere to be seen in 1965.
At this point I'd like apologise to my mother for being born on the precise day of her 30th birthday. However, given that I had no choice in the timing of my birth, this monumental coincidence is at least half her own fault. I realise that my selfish pushing and shoving wrecked any hopes she might have had of a traditional birthday celebration, but at least she got a free night out in the centre of Watford as a result. And, as a result of our perfect thirty year age gap, I have never once forgotten her birthday, nor she mine. See you tomorrow, Mum.
Mid-life crisis (because, if I can't have a mid life crisis on the eve of my 40th birthday, when can I?)
My life is going nowhere.
I spend most of my time at work, where I'm overexploited and underappreciated. I arrive in the office far too early in the morning, I do a bloody marvellous job with care and dedication, and I'm often still there after everyone else has gone home. I get stuff done, I'm never off sick, I hit every deadline they throw at me and I smile in the face of adversity. I know everyone would be lost without me, but equally I have no doubt that I'm replaceable. I've now mastered most of what makes my job challenging, but I have no ambition to move onward and upward into anything more managerial or corporate. In short, I'm quite content to continue blindly into career obsolescence until some external influence comes along and forces me to move on.
I spend most of the rest of my time at home, where I'm underexploited and overappreciated. I look out of my window a lot, but I don't go off and experience the outside world as often as I should. I have nothing I need to do, so I tend to do nothing. I used to have a social life, back when people used to drag me out on a regular basis, but I've let that gradually slide to the point where nobody invites me out and I invite nobody either. I ignore the doorbell when it rings because it's never a genuine visitor. I've given up on looking for someone to share my life with, even short segments of it, because not making an effort is easier. In short, I've learnt to fill my time by constructing a webpage and then finding things to fill it, which is probably better for you than it is for me.
So, on the last day of my thirties, perhaps now is the time for me to effect a change. This is traditionally the age where men go off the rails and launch into a second childhood, perhaps buying themselves a motorbike, running off with the au pair or getting an ill-advised tattoo. But somehow I can't see me doing any of those things. Instead I suspect that my high levels of personal inertia are a consequence of me being satisfied with my life. I have a decent job I enjoy, I have nobody to support and I'm happy with my own company. I'm not in ill health, I'm comfortably off and I have a roof over my head. In short, I'm not desperate to change my life because I'm content with where I'm at already. And I'd rather be bored than unhappy any day. Roll on 40 - I'm ready for you.
Going back to my roots: Croxley Green, Herts my family, 1930s-1990s
All of which ancestral wandering brings me back to the village where I grew up. OK, so it's a bit of a cheat pretending that a commuter town with a population of eleven thousand is a village, but in comparison to neighbouring Watford the place is positively rural. Croxley Green lies in the southwest corner of Hertfordshire on the edge of Metroland, so you may have seen the place lovingly revered in John Betjeman's definitive 1973 documentary.
"Child of the first war, forgotten by the second, we called you Metroland. We laid our schemes, lured by the lush brochure, down by-ways beckoned, to build at last the cottage of our dreams, a city clerk turned countryman again, and linked to the metropolis by train."
My music teacher appeared in Metroland, conducting the school orchestra at Croxley's annual "let's pretend to be a village" village fair. I'm relieved that John and his BBC camera crew didn't turn up three years later because that was the year I was selected as one of the 24 maypole dancers, and wearing short trousers on television isn't good for one's street cred. I did wonder whether my maypoling had been immortalised on the new village sign, but closer inspection revealed that all of the twirling silhouettes are female - damn.
I could write at least a month's worth of posts about CroxleyGreen but I won't (I'll save that for some year in the distant future when I'm determined to haemorrhage readership). Today I'll just content myself with a report from the site of the village's most famous export. Right opposite the house where my dad grew up.
This is Common Moor Lock on the Grand Union Canal. Just over 70 years ago my newlywed grandparents moved into a Metroland semi on the banks of the canal here (hidden behind the trees to the left at the rear of the photo). Their lovingly-tended garden sloped down to the canal towpath at a gradient of 1 in 5, so it was all the more impressive that I chose their lawn to take my very first toddling steps. I wouldn't risk it today because the latest owners appear to have abandoned a car at the bottom of the garden, next to a pile of bricks and some rusty wire fencing. Looking out across the canal there used to be a fine view of the John Dickinson Paper Mill, home of world-famous CroxleyScript paper. Bet you've used it. DH Lawrence swore by it. I remember the huge mill buildings well, standing sheer above the canal like an industrial cliff face, but alas they no longer stand. 150 years of paper production ceased in 1980 and the site (right of photo) is now covered by a swathe of modern housing - with tiny flat uninspiring lawns.
Ten things you need to know about the newRadio 1Top 40chart show: 10) It's barely a chart show any more (the top 40 takes up less than 60% of the show) 9) It's trying too hard to imitate independent radio's showbizzy Hit 40 UK (which is a huge error) 8) New presenters JK and Joel definitely aren't Alan Freeman or Bruno Brookes 7) The first half hour is all 'entertainment news' (very fluffy and quite utterly pointless) 6) The second half hour is a rundown of the album chart (with two banal pre-recorded interviews) 5) There's a 15 minute 'Guess the (very recent) year' Golden Hour-type slot, allowing one thick listener to win a cheap prize 4) Singles 40-21 are then crammed into 20 minutes (even if this means not playing six of the new entries) 3) The Top 20 is played in full, sort of, although everything still gets talked over 2) If you really must listen, tune in at 5:35 1) On second thoughts, don't ever bother again
Going back to my roots: 40 South Molton Street, London W1 great grandfather Edward, born 1870
When most people search back through their family tree, I suspect they're secretly hoping to uncover somebody famous. Not me. When I searched back through my family tree I was hoping to find a genuine Londoner. And with my great grandfather I hit the jackpot.
40 South Molton Street is about as central as London gets: just off Oxford Street, round the corner from Bond Street tube station and on the fringes of Mayfair. It's now an exclusiveshopping street full of designer labels, but a hundred years ago they made clothes here rather than selling them. My great grandfather Edward was born at 40 South Molton Street - the tall thin brick building in the centre of my photograph - and from here plied his trade as a tailor. I can't say I share his talent - even sewing on a button is too much effort for me - but I'm mighty envious both of his skill and of his geographical location.
On my family's last visit to the capital I took my nephews and niece back to see where their London roots lie. They were less than impressed, I suspect because the building wasn't Hamleys. They'd be even less impressed today because 40 South Molton Street is shrouded in scaffolding. If you're ever down this way, look out for the ugly frontage swathed in steel, plywood and green netting. The ground floor is now occupied by The Red Rock Cafe, a tiny catering establishment that makes its living feeding the passing fashion victims. I thought it might be a lovely idea to pop in one day and take lunch in my great grandfather's old home, but that was before I saw the prices listed on the menu outside. Call me miserly but I reckoned £6.40 was a bit steep for a jacket potato topped with cheese and beans, so I just had to make do with staring in through the window and scaring the patrons with my camera.
Going back to my roots: Selfridges, London W1 great grandfather Edward married great grandmother Frances, 1900
Yes, it's true - my great grandparents were married in Selfridges, right here in this garage. Let me explain...
Edward and Frances were married on Easter Saturday 1900 in St Thomas's Church in Orchard Street, just off Portman Square. South Molton Street is less than a quarter of a mile away, so it made perfect sense for the two of them to get wed in the local parish church. Alas the building no longer stands, and the reason for its demise was the expansion of Oxford Street's most famous department store. Selfridges first opened in 1909, the brainchild of American entrepreneur Gordon Selfridge. His vision was that every visit to the store should be 'an event', and people flocked from far and wide to prove him right. Selfridges was so successful that by 1928 it had doubled in size, which meant knocking down some of the existing buildings behind the store, which meant the loss of St Thomas's. The altar screen and organ were shipped off to St Thomas's Church in Hanwell where they still do sterling work, but the original site now serves a different god.
I went back to stand on the spot where my great grandparents pledged their troth, hoping that it might have been in the middle of what's now the Food Hall. But no. The rear of Selfridges is a grim place, just a service road lined by characterless buildings, and totally unlike the elegance of the imposing frontage. Round the back is where the deliveries are made and, almost precisely where the altar of St Thomas's once stood, there's this garage selling expensive petrol to posh drivers in Daimlers with money to burn. I was mighty disappointed. But if any of you are interested in getting married in Selfridges there's still a chance. The store is holding a 'Vegas' promotion next month and they're looking for a couple willing to get married in a mock Little White Wedding Chapel in store. A century ago, no gimmicks were required.
Going back to my roots: Waltham Abbey, Essex great grandfather James, 1864
By an splendid but unplanned coincidence, my ancestral tour today jumps from the site of King Harold's death to the supposed site of his burial. This is WalthamAbbey, an imposing building with a thousand year history, first established by Harold himself a few years before he became king. After the Battle of Hastings legend tells that Harold's body was laid to rest here, and two stones to the east of the present church still mark the supposed burial site today. And it was just across the river from this famous church that my great-grandfather made his living.
Thanks to census data, it's possible to track my great grandfather's life in rather more detail than any of my previous relatives. He was born in 1864 in Brewer'sEnd Cottage in Takeley, an idyllic rural spot (in those days at least, because nobody had yet built Stansted Airport less than a mile to the north). By 1881, at the age of 17, young James had left home to move into lodgings in Roydon (just outside Harlow) and was busy working as an agricultural labourer. By the night of the 1891 census he'd moved to nearby Nazeing, married my great grandmother and had a six month old daughter to support. And he also had a fascinating new job.
The Royal Gunpowder Mills have been a centre for the manufacture of explosives since the 17th century, from the gunpowder stockpiled beneath Parliament by Guy Fawkes to the explosives dropped by the Dambusters during the Second World War. My great grandfather was one of thousands of local residents who found employment here, commuting three miles on foot down the Lea Valley every day to reach the factory. James's job is listed as "Danger House Man", which sounds really quite exciting (but may just have been a glorified Health and Safety operative). He worked there right up until his death in 1914, just before the factory's busiest years supplying munitions, death and carnage to the trenches of World War One. The mills finally closed in 1991 and were recently reopened as a museum and heritage attraction. I'd love to show you a photograph of the place, but the museum is currently closed until the start of the summer season in April. I'll definitely be back.
My thanks to everyone who turned up to contribute to the dg Creme Egg Birthday Appeal last night. I was successful in liberating a total of 16 chocolate eggs from your clutches, notwithstanding additional emergency supplies in the form of mini eggs, buttons and cake. Your generous, and unexpected, donations have been appreciated.
Going back to your roots: Battle, Sussex some victorious French soldier, 1066
Back in 1066 the entire kingdom of England was under threat from murderous immigrants. If it wasn't Norwegians massing to attack across the North Sea it was Frenchmen intent on invading across the Channel, and poor King Harold spent most of the year trying to keep everyone at bay. He failed. You probably know the story of England's most important battle, especially if your history teachers did a good job. But you may not know that the battle actually took place at Senlac Hill, seven miles up the road from Hastings. Today there's a small medieval town on the site, a town with the appropriate but stunningly unoriginal name of Battle. Go back five generations and some of my ancestors came from here. But go back forty generations and, if you're of English descent, I bet some of your genes were fighting on this very hillside...
I was very impressed to discover that England's most important battlefield remains pretty much unspoilt to this day. Apart from the huge abbey and monastery on the hilltop that is, and these were built centuries ago well before the introduction of rigorous conservation legislation. The site is now owned by English Heritage, and they'll only charge you a fiver to enter through the Abbey gateway and step back into the 11th century. It was eerily quiet on this most famous hillside last Saturday afternoon, with just myself and a small party of Dutch tourists squelching round the battlefield in the unexpected sunshine. Instead of swords we held "audio wands", listening to well-written commentaries which brought the stories of the dead back to life. The guided walk took us from the abbey terrace where King Harold's shield wall stood firm, right down to the lake at the foot of the hill where the Norman knights gathered. Inbetween were the killing fields, now just grass and mud and trees and bracken. I was taken by how ordinary the place looked, but how special it felt.
On that distant Saturday back in 1066, the day-long battle could have gone either way. Harold's men were knackered after an unexpected trek up to Yorkshire and back, but they also had a superior tactical location on the top of the hill. Had they stayed in position, William's soldiers might never have been victorious. But the Normans were devious strategists and pretended to take flight, encouraging the English to break ranks and lose their advantage. In the ensuing skirmish a hail of arrows rained down behind the Saxon shield line and Harold was unexpectedly pierced. That one fatal eye-wound delivered victory to the French and changed the course of English history. The high altar of Battle Abbey was later built on the spot where Harold fell, and a stone tablet still marks the site today.
I left the battlefield with ancient mud caked to the bottom of my shoes. There were still monastery ruins to explore, a museum to wander round and a small gift shop to ignore. As I walked back out into the 21st century I was humbled by the events this site had witnessed. And I was reminded that, although I shall never be able to trace my earliest ancestors, I am in fact a genetic hotchpotch of hundreds of thousands of invaders and settlers, each with their own unique life story to tell. And some of them are even French.
Going back to my roots: Battle, Sussex great-great-great grandfather James, born 1820
This is St Mary's Church in Battle, far less famous than Battle Abbey just over the road, but almost as old and rather more important to me. It was here, within 100 yards of the spot where King Harold died, that my great-great-great grandfather James was baptised and married. He was dipped in the Norman font in 1820 and walked up the 12th century nave in 1842 to wed gamekeeper's daughter Sarah. The happy couple were most likely buried here as well, given that people didn't tend to move far in those days, but my search through the lichen-covered gravestones proved unsuccessful.
The small town of Battle still has one foot firmly in the past. As well as the battlefield and Abbey ruins, the traditional high street still remains something of an anachronism. Homely tearooms and a proper butchers are crammed in beside a Victorian sweetshop and 18th century apothecary. Smiling families with 2.4 impeccably behaved children bustle along the narrow pavements buying groceries, kitchenware and designer artefacts. Shoppers here are far more likely to buy a ball of wool than a mobile phone, and the Happy Meal has yet to oust the dainty plate of toasted crumpets dripping with jam. The nostalgic England that Daily Mail readers crave is still alive in Battle, and not in any bad way.
Going back to my roots: Harefield, Middlesex great-great-great grandfather William, born 1808
While my mother's side of the family were busy murdering people, my father's forebears were busy being industrious, right here. This is CopperMillLock on the Grand Union canal, just down the hill from world-famous HarefieldHospital. We're on the very edge of north-west London (Hertfordshire starts about five metres to the right of this photo) beside the banks of the river Colne, surrounded by rolling hills and gravel-bottomed lakes. I'm sure the view would have been gorgeous had it not been for the heavy mist hanging over the river valley on the day I visited. The canal passed this way in 1797, just a decade before my great-great-great grandfather William was born. He and his three brothers all worked in this riverside mill, making copper which was used to line ships for the Napoleonic Wars. William married a local lass and they lived in an artisan's cottage beside the canal, although sadly I could find no trace of the ancestral pile when I went back to take a look. But the mill buildings were still there, now redivided into tasteful modern hi-tech business units. And the canal still looked much as it would have done two centuries ago, just so long as I ignored the gastropub, the modern office development and the group of canoeists zigzagging through the millstream.
Ever tried finding out stuff about a town or village on the internet? Obviously I've been doing a lot of this recently, trying to find out more about the places where my ancestors once lived. Search engines used to be good for this sort of thing, say around three years ago, and you'd usually find some useful local history, community or business website. Not any more. Geographical search queries are now plagued by unwanted advertising portals, each masquerading as a useful resource until you click to discover a useless generic page. It's like reading a Readers Digest Prize Draw letter ("you have been selected out of all the households in <insert name of town>...") only without the free biro. Let me show you what I mean with this Google search:
Widdington Information Online - guide and directory for Widdington, Essex, UK with tourist information sounds like the most useful Widdington-related website ever, until you discover that it has no information of any use whatsoever. The site promises "whatever you want to find around Widdington; shops, businesses, hotels, pubs, restaurants, clubs, cinemas, theatres, etc." Clearly nobody related to the site has ever been to Widdington, given that the village doesn't boast even a single shop. No, this is just a scummy web presence with computer-generated pages named after every town and village in the country, and the only links it has are useless ad-fuelled dead ends.
Or how about the marketing black hole that is cityvisitor.com. Only an automatic spam-drone could describe Widdington (population almost 1000) as a city. This glorified hotelroom-seller promises everything you might need to "plan your trip, select the restaurants you visit, the art galleries you wander into in the afternoon and where you eat in the evenings." Odd that the local pub doesn't get a mention, given that it's the only place you can buy food for miles around. At least Google did throw up some interesting stuff about Widdington in amongst the onlinedrivel. But I worry that if I were to try the same search in three years time it'd be hard to find the golden nuggets in the spamsite haystack.
Going back to my (murderous) roots: Widdington, Essex great-great-great-great-great uncle John, born 1802
Just off the main London to Cambridge road, a few miles north of Stansted Airport, lies the dead-end village of Widdington. It's a picturesque village surrounded by fields and woodland, complete with 13th century church, 16th century pub and 19th century murder (of which more later). In the churchyard I found a couple of relatives' gravestones (which was a bit of a thrill). Around the triangular village green I found an old bakery and an old post office (except they were now called "The Old Bakery" and "The Old Post Office" and people lived in them). And hidden on a hilltop I found one of the finest surviving medieval barns in south east England (except it was closed). You'd like the place.
My quadruple-great grandfather Thomas was born in Widdington in 1770, as was his father before him. Thomas was "an industrious labourer" and of "good character", and worked in the employ of the local landowner. He was father to a daughter and five sons, one of whom passed his genes on to me. But one of the other sons, John, never got round to starting his own family because at the age of 21 he was convicted of murder. And he committed his heinous crime right here, down this very country lane.
"There is just at the particular part of the road alluded to, a distance of nearly a mile either way, in which not a cottage or vestige of security presents itself. It was in such a dreary spot that the murderer attacked the unfortunate victim of his malice - a bare mile from Widdington only, in a narrow road, where the sides are thrown up so as to exclude any distant view by open day, and prevent the voice from being heard by night; at this point, and in the darkest part of Monday evening last, when fatigued in his endeavours to ascend a very steep hill, Mr. Mumford appears to have been attacked, and with such remorseless fury, that the spot exhibits but little signs that any resistance could be made. The blood itself cries aloud for retribution; it's purple stream is even now clearly visible and will long remain." (Chelmsford Chronicle, Friday December 12 1823)
Almost two centuries later that bloodstain is long gone, but the country lane is still as dark, secluded and remote as ever it was, even in daylight. I went for a cautious walk up the hillside in the footsteps of my homicidal ancestor, following the route he'd taken on his final journey as a free man. John had been binge drinking too much in the nearby village of Quendon, and took it upon himself to follow the local landowner's son home. But only halfway home...
"The head was beat in at the hind part, the jaw was crushed to pieces, and the bludgeon with which it was effected being jagged, the face and even under the chin was so torn that it was first thought that a sharper instrument had been used, the blood having run down the road in a stream. The deceased could not possibly be recognised by the nearest relative, but from other proofs than those of his former features."
Confused by drunken bloodlust, John hoped to cover his tracks by pretending he'd discovered this mutilated body on the road. He proceeded up the hill, carrying the bloodied corpse over his back, and delivered the body to the Fleur-de-Lys pub (pictured left). John wasn't the brightest of men (the local newspaper described him as "an illiterate yokel") so he made two crucial mistakes. Firstly he announced to the pub precisely who the dead man was, despite the fact that nobody else could possibly recognise the disfigured face. Secondly, and rather more stupidly, John was discovered with Mumford's bloodied knife still in his back pocket. He was arrested on the spot, although it took seven villagers to restrain him. He was then carted off to Chelmsford where he was locked up and tried for murder, before being taken to the gallows three days later.
"The prisoner was a stout athletic man, of great muscular power; he had that pale, unsound appearance which we frequently observe in those whose earnings are spent in superfluous drink, and which idle habits induce them to prefer. He still wore the bloodstained smock in which he had been arrested. Amongst the crowd present were half a dozen young men weeping most bitterly and uttering compulsive sobs; all were relations. The executioner shook the condemned man's hands, removed the steps and the platform dropped back on its hinges. The crowd looked on in silence, with awe but not with sympathy. Many noted the prisoner's dreadfully expressive face, drawn up by the agony of despair."
I wonder whether the present inhabitants of Widdington know the story of their village's darkest day. Thankfully when they saw me wandering around outside the pub they didn't form a lynch mob and hold me to account for this ancient crime. Nevertheless I didn't hang around for too long, just in case. And I kept looking behind me as I walked down that infamous lane out of the village, because blood sticks.
The last time I ever saw my grandmother, I asked her to tell me the story of how she and my grandfather first met. I'm not quite sure why I asked - maybe I sensed that it might be my last chance - but I'm glad I heard the story before the memory vanished forever. She told me that back in the early 1930s both she and my future grandfather happened to be living a few miles apart in north-west London, but that's not where they met. No, my grandmother first clapped eyes on my grandfather during a trip to the seaside - in Clacton of all places. He was throwing stones at a tin can and she fancied him... and they got married a few years later.
So, I'd not be here today were it not for a tin can in Clacton. Or, for that matter, a whole number of other emotional attractions and geographical coincidences dating back to the dawn of time. I'm only here because all my ancestors happened to meet, and have sex with, the right person, and because none of them got killed off by illness or accident before child-bearing age. To be honest, the chances of me being here today are infinitesimally small. But the fact that you're reading this page today means that the countless chain of probabilities worked out in the end, and you have my ancestors to thank for that.
Like many other Britons I've gone digging back into my past to find out who my ancestors are. With the aid of existing family records I've been able to uncover genealogical information about as many as 50 of my direct ancestors, dating back as far as the early 18th century. I've also discovered in which parts of the country my roots lie. My father's side of the family, for example, seem to have lived in and around north-west London for most of their lives, while my mother's side have been gradually migrating down the M11 from the Cambridge area towards the M25 since the early 1700s.
So, in the run-up to my 40th birthday next week, I've decided to go back and visit some of the more interesting places where some of my more interesting ancestors once lived. Yes, I know this is all very self-indulgent, and of direct interest to a very small audience most of whom are dead, but do bear with me. I can promise you a visit to the famous store on Oxford Street where my great-grandparents got married, the quiet Essex country lane where one of my ancestors murdered the local landowner, and the small Sussex village where (arguably) all of English genealogy began. I'm starting today with the birthplace of my oldest known relative, and then I shall be working forwards to the present day. And don't worry, I didn't go back to Clacton...
Going back to my roots: Newport, Essex great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather Edward, born 1720
I can trace my roots back no further than this small village in north west Essex, which I guess makes me an Essex boy at heart. If you've ever driven up the M11 from London to Cambridge you'll have passed within a whisker of here, halfway up that 15 mile stretch where there aren't any junctions. Newport is one of those almost-pretty East Anglian villages with quaint pastel-painted cottages lining the high street. To its credit, much of the 21st century has been held at bay and a surprising amount of the 18th (or even 17th) century remains. My grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's grandfather might even recognise some of that today. He was born and died in the village, and he's buried somewhere in the churchyard (although I couldn't identify which crumbling gravestone might be his when I stopped by for a visit). Edward married wife Martha in 1741 and she gave birth to three sons, one of them suspiciously close to the wedding day. I was dead chuffed to discover that the cottage to the right of this photo still bears the family name. There's no guarantee that any of my ancestors ever lived in this old farmhouse, admittedly, but at least I can now imagine them all growing up here, with the waters of the River Cam trickling slowly by at the bottom of the garden. An excellent place to have one's roots.
What's on this weekend? Christmas Past Tue 24 Nov - Sun 3 Jan 2010
Annual exhibition at the Geffrye Museum where all the period rooms are decked in authentic festive style. Luvvit.
Tomorrow is the last day of Routemaster operation on route 19 between Battersea and Finsbury Park. I took a ride on the 19 last week, just because I can't next week. They've already started the changeover, so I had to wait beside Battersea Bridge for 15 minutes while a couple of dull modern double deckers emerged from the old shed that doubles as a bus garage. But then I nabbed the top deck front seat view on the next vintage vehicle for a snail's pace crawl across Central London, and suddenly the wait was worthwhile. We got stuck in a jam in Knightsbridge for 20 minutes, but (unlike next week) the Japanese tourists sitting to my right were still able to hop off the open platform and escape. We paraded up Shaftesbury Avenue which, until tomorrow night at least, is the only road in Central London where every bus is still a Routemaster. We transported some Chelsea nobs to the art galleries up Piccadilly and we delivered a smiling kid with an Incredibles balloon (and her dad) to the estates of Highbury. At least four different middle-aged blokes took our photograph as we passed. During the journey the conductor's memory failed him and he asked to check my ticket twice, although admittedly the two occasions were over an hour apart. I sincerely hope he has a job lined up for next week, but somehow I doubt it.
Takeaway That - Relight My Frier
Ten years ago today the East End came to a halt for the funeral of Ronnie Kray. The gangland boss suffered a heart attack in Broadmoor at the age of 61 and died in Wexham Park Hospital a couple of days later. Poor bloke - not even a convicted psychopath deserves to die in Slough. Ronnie's body was taken, after a post mortem, to the funeral parlour of W English and Son in the Bethnal Green Road, from where his final journey began on the afternoon of 29th March 1995. Thousands gathered in the surrounding streets to see the funeral procession, either to pay their last respects or for a final sneaky look at an East End legend. Reggie's coffin was placed in a glass-sided hearse, pulled by six plumed horses and overflowing with floral tributes. The cortege halted briefly just round the corner in Vallance Road outside the site of the twins' former home, although the original two-up two-down at number 178 no longer stood as it had been rebuilt as community housing. And from here it was just a few short yards up the road beside the railway viaduct to the church where the funeral service was to be held.
St Matthew's Church stands alone in the middle of a postwar housing estate, a beacon of brown on a patch of green surrounded by grey. There's been a church here for 250 years, although the increasingly multicultural nature of the surrounding area suggests that it may not last as a functional place of worship for very much longer. I paid a visit last week, wandering through the churchyard past dogwaste bins and teenagers gulping underage alcohol. Peering through the church's glass front door I saw a bright modern interior with a few wooden chairs gathered in the middle of a empty polished floor. It was hard to imagine, but ten years ago the church was completely packed out.
Easter Eggs hunt: Here are clues to 20 words that sound like they start with 'eggs', but don't. Each clue has two parts - a definition of the complete word and a definition of the non-eggs part of the word. For example, "shout demand" would be eggsclaim and "modify swap" would be eggschange. How many can you identify?
Who's London
The first Doctor Who story I ever remember watching was Jon Pertwee's first - this delightful tale where plastic objects suddenly spring to life. Just my luck to start watching in time for one of the scariest scenes ever, the one where plastic dummies burst out of shop windows and shoot innocent passing members of the public. One minute people were going about their everyday shopping, the next they were gunned down by lumbering mannequins with firearms concealed within their drop-down wrists. How was a five year old supposed to face shopping in the local high street after that?
Still, at least my local high street wasn't Ealing Broadway where these particular scenes were filmed. I paid my very first visit to Ealing last Saturday afternoon in an attempt to lay my childhood demons to rest. The shop I came to see was John Sanders, a traditional department store from the era before bland corporate retailing. No stranger to disaster, the building had survived a direct hit from a V1 bomb during World War Two 25 years before its glass was again shattered during the Auton Invasion of 1970. But John Sanders couldn't hold out as an independent retailer forever and so its mythical shop window now belongs to Marks and Spencer instead. And there are still dummies in it.
Looks evil, doesn't she? She's one of the three mannequins still keeping watch over the unsuspecting people of Ealing Broadway, staring through faceless eyes out across the pelican crossing towards Christ The Saviour church. Three more dummies lurk just inside the M&S entrance, bedecked in red 'sale' t-shirts, awaiting the signal that will snap them back to life. Because, haven't you heard, the Autons are invading again, tonight at 7pm. This time it's Oxford Street that's going to be attacked, but don't worry because a new Doctor will be on hand to save the day (and to lure one of the shop assistants off to a new life). I'm delighted not just that the show is returning but that script writer Russell T Davies has chosen to relaunch the new series using my very first Doctor Who nightmares. And I really hope that, next Saturday, there'll be small five year old boys walking down Ealing Broadway keeping an especially tight hold on their parent's hand, just in case that nearby shop window shatters and the invasion begins for real.
Perivale is very London. John Betjeman described the place as a "parish of enormous hayfields", but you'd be hard pushed to agree with him today. Now it's a patch of 1930s semis built alongside the A40, just west of the Hanger Lane gyratory system. Perivale's most famous landmark is probably the Art Deco Hoover Building, a Grade 1 listed white structure now sympathetically converted to a Tesco hypermarket. It's even lit up emerald green at night, just to show how much loved it is. But that's about as thrilling as Perivale gets. There is the Grand Union Canal, and the Central line and a huge Royal Mail sorting office, and even a very big hill (of which more later). But Perivale is mostly houses.
This is the house on the corner of Bleasdale Avenue and Colwyn Avenue, outside which the Tardis materialised at the start of the final Doctor Who story. We're on the Medway estate, a well-kept network of mock tudor semis and desirable council housing complete with spring blossom and multi-car ownership. In the TV series these leafy avenues were supposed to be where Ace grew up, popping down to the shops on Medway Parade and hanging out in the recreation ground opposite the station. Here the feline Cheetah People struck, carting off the local adolescents to hunt as prey on their distant homeworld. I watched as a silent milkfloat hummed by, and shuddered slightly as a small cat stopped to look at me from the pavement. All wonderfully ordinary, just like the streets where I grew up, and so typical of Doctor Who to place the terrifying slap bang in the middle of the mundane.
76 Totters Lane
Coal Hill School
William Hartnell (1963-66)
Patrick Troughton (1966-69)
Jon Pertwee (1970-74)
Tom Baker (1974-81)
Peter Davison (1981-84)
Colin Baker (1984-86)
Sylvester McCoy (1987-89)
Easter marches on
St Patrick's Day Quiz
Bow Road station update: It's exactly a year since Bow Road station was first closed at 10pm every night so that renovation work could (supposedly) take place. A year of early closures, and a year of me having to take a longer route home whenever I've been out late. Had I been mugged on the walk back, which thankfully I wasn't, maybe I could have sued. But in the last fortnight, all of a sudden with absolutely no publicity whatsoever, the station's opening hours have been returned to normal. Trains are now pulling into a very different Bow Road station to that which used to exist a year ago. Take a look.
Except they promised us it wasn't going to look modern. This station upgrade was supposed to retain all of the station's key Edwardian architectural features. I'm sure they're all still there, somewhere underneath this modern veneer, but both platforms now have rather more of an 'airport terminal' feeling to them. There are little four-seater benches that wouldn't look out of place at IKEA, there's strip lighting that might be found in any office, and there's an artificial white coating covering the full length of each wall. It's even less traditional up the stairwells where giant alien globes have landed, masquerading as light fittings. And everywhere, absolutely every-bloody-where, there are all-pervasive security cameras. I suspect these are to be monitored from the brand new control room that's magically appeared off the ticket hall, which should give the station staff somewhere warm to sit and read their newspapers while they continue to ignore all the passing passengers.
Weekend tube closures
Going back to my roots: dead end
I don't feel a day over 40
And finally, back to the very spot where I was born. Not that I was born in the middle of a four lane concrete highway, you understand. It's just that during the last 40 years the Shrodells Maternity Unit has been knocked down to make way for the Watford ring road. There may still be a road sign marked 'Deliveries' by the side of the road, but this is no longer a good place to have regular contractions. I'm sure it won't surprise you to hear that I was born within 100 yards of a tube station (or at least it was one at the time), but the green dome of the Watford Mosque was absolutely nowhere to be seen in 1965.
My music teacher appeared in Metroland, conducting the school orchestra at Croxley's annual "let's pretend to be a village" village fair. I'm relieved that John and his BBC camera crew didn't turn up three years later because that was the year I was selected as one of the 24 maypole dancers, and wearing short trousers on television isn't good for one's street cred. I did wonder whether my maypoling had been immortalised on the new village sign, but closer inspection revealed that all of the twirling silhouettes are female - damn.
This is Common Moor Lock on the Grand Union Canal. Just over 70 years ago my newlywed grandparents moved into a Metroland semi on the banks of the canal here (hidden behind the trees to the left at the rear of the photo). Their lovingly-tended garden sloped down to the canal towpath at a gradient of 1 in 5, so it was all the more impressive that I chose their lawn to take my very first toddling steps. I wouldn't risk it today because the latest owners appear to have abandoned a car at the bottom of the garden, next to a pile of bricks and some rusty wire fencing. Looking out across the canal there used to be a fine view of the John Dickinson Paper Mill, home of world-famous Croxley Script paper. Bet you've used it. DH Lawrence swore by it. I remember the huge mill buildings well, standing sheer above the canal like an industrial cliff face, but alas they no longer stand. 150 years of paper production ceased in 1980 and the site (right of photo) is now covered by a swathe of modern housing - with tiny flat uninspiring lawns.
When most people search back through their family tree, I suspect they're secretly hoping to uncover somebody famous. Not me. When I searched back through my family tree I was hoping to find a genuine Londoner. And with my great grandfather I hit the jackpot.
On my family's last visit to the capital I took my nephews and niece back to see where their London roots lie. They were less than impressed, I suspect because the building wasn't Hamleys. They'd be even less impressed today because 40 South Molton Street is shrouded in scaffolding. If you're ever down this way, look out for the ugly frontage swathed in steel, plywood and green netting. The ground floor is now occupied by The Red Rock Cafe, a tiny catering establishment that makes its living feeding the passing fashion victims. I thought it might be a lovely idea to pop in one day and take lunch in my great grandfather's old home, but that was before I saw the prices listed on the menu outside. Call me miserly but I reckoned £6.40 was a bit steep for a jacket potato topped with cheese and beans, so I just had to make do with staring in through the window and scaring the patrons with my camera.
Edward and Frances were married on Easter Saturday 1900 in St Thomas's Church in Orchard Street, just off Portman Square. South Molton Street is less than a quarter of a mile away, so it made perfect sense for the two of them to get wed in the local parish church. Alas the building no longer stands, and the reason for its demise was the expansion of Oxford Street's most famous department store. Selfridges first opened in 1909, the brainchild of American entrepreneur Gordon Selfridge. His vision was that every visit to the store should be 'an event', and people flocked from far and wide to prove him right. Selfridges was so successful that by 1928 it had doubled in size, which meant knocking down some of the existing buildings behind the store, which meant the loss of St Thomas's. The altar screen and organ were shipped off to St Thomas's Church in Hanwell where they still do sterling work, but the original site now serves a different god.
By an splendid but unplanned coincidence, my ancestral tour today jumps from the site of King Harold's death to the supposed site of his burial. This is Waltham Abbey, an imposing building with a thousand year history, first established by Harold himself a few years before he became king. After the Battle of Hastings legend tells that Harold's body was laid to rest here, and two stones to the east of the present church still mark the supposed burial site today. And it was just across the river from this famous church that my great-grandfather made his living.
I left the battlefield with ancient mud caked to the bottom of my shoes. There were still monastery ruins to explore, a museum to wander round and a small gift shop to ignore. As I walked back out into the 21st century I was humbled by the events this site had witnessed. And I was reminded that, although I shall never be able to trace my earliest ancestors, I am in fact a genetic hotchpotch of hundreds of thousands of invaders and settlers, each with their own unique life story to tell. And some of them are even French.
This is St Mary's Church in Battle, far less famous than Battle Abbey just over the road, but almost as old and rather more important to me. It was here, within 100 yards of the spot where King Harold died, that my great-great-great grandfather James was baptised and married. He was dipped in the Norman font in 1820 and walked up the 12th century nave in 1842 to wed gamekeeper's daughter Sarah. The happy couple were most likely buried here as well, given that people didn't tend to move far in those days, but my search through the lichen-covered gravestones proved unsuccessful.
While my mother's side of the family were busy murdering people, my father's forebears were busy being industrious, right here. This is Copper Mill Lock on the Grand Union canal, just down the hill from world-famous Harefield Hospital. We're on the very edge of north-west London (Hertfordshire starts about five metres to the right of this photo) beside the banks of the river Colne, surrounded by rolling hills and gravel-bottomed lakes. I'm sure the view would have been gorgeous had it not been for the heavy mist hanging over the river valley on the day I visited. The canal passed this way in 1797, just a decade before my great-great-great grandfather William was born. He and his three brothers all worked in this riverside mill, making copper which was used to line ships for the Napoleonic Wars. William married a local lass and they lived in an artisan's cottage beside the canal, although sadly I could find no trace of the ancestral pile when I went back to take a look. But the mill buildings were still there, now redivided into tasteful modern hi-tech business units. And the canal still looked much as it would have done two centuries ago, just so long as I ignored the gastropub, the modern office development and the group of canoeists zigzagging through the millstream.
Just off the main London to Cambridge road, a few miles north of Stansted Airport, lies the dead-end village of Widdington. It's a picturesque village surrounded by fields and woodland, complete with 13th century church, 16th century pub and 19th century murder (of which more later). In the churchyard I found a couple of relatives' gravestones (which was a bit of a thrill). Around the triangular village green I found an old bakery and an old post office (except they were now called "The Old Bakery" and "The Old Post Office" and people lived in them). And hidden on a hilltop I found one of the finest surviving medieval barns in south east England (except it was closed). You'd like the place.
"There is just at the particular part of the road alluded to, a distance of nearly a mile either way, in which not a cottage or vestige of security presents itself. It was in such a dreary spot that the murderer attacked the unfortunate victim of his malice - a bare mile from Widdington only, in a narrow road, where the sides are thrown up so as to exclude any distant view by open day, and prevent the voice from being heard by night; at this point, and in the darkest part of Monday evening last, when fatigued in his endeavours to ascend a very steep hill, Mr. Mumford appears to have been attacked, and with such remorseless fury, that the spot exhibits but little signs that any resistance could be made. The blood itself cries aloud for retribution; it's purple stream is even now clearly visible and will long remain." (Chelmsford Chronicle, Friday December 12 1823)
"The head was beat in at the hind part, the jaw was crushed to pieces, and the bludgeon with which it was effected being jagged, the face and even under the chin was so torn that it was first thought that a sharper instrument had been used, the blood having run down the road in a stream. The deceased could not possibly be recognised by the nearest relative, but from other proofs than those of his former features."Confused by drunken bloodlust, John hoped to cover his tracks by pretending he'd discovered this mutilated body on the road. He proceeded up the hill, carrying the bloodied corpse over his back, and delivered the body to the Fleur-de-Lys pub (pictured left). John wasn't the brightest of men (the local newspaper described him as "an illiterate yokel") so he made two crucial mistakes. Firstly he announced to the pub precisely who the dead man was, despite the fact that nobody else could possibly recognise the disfigured face. Secondly, and rather more stupidly, John was discovered with Mumford's bloodied knife still in his back pocket. He was arrested on the spot, although it took seven villagers to restrain him. He was then carted off to Chelmsford where he was locked up and tried for murder, before being taken to the gallows three days later.
"The prisoner was a stout athletic man, of great muscular power; he had that pale, unsound appearance which we frequently observe in those whose earnings are spent in superfluous drink, and which idle habits induce them to prefer. He still wore the bloodstained smock in which he had been arrested. Amongst the crowd present were half a dozen young men weeping most bitterly and uttering compulsive sobs; all were relations. The executioner shook the condemned man's hands, removed the steps and the platform dropped back on its hinges. The crowd looked on in silence, with awe but not with sympathy. Many noted the prisoner's dreadfully expressive face, drawn up by the agony of despair."I wonder whether the present inhabitants of Widdington know the story of their village's darkest day. Thankfully when they saw me wandering around outside the pub they didn't form a lynch mob and hold me to account for this ancient crime. Nevertheless I didn't hang around for too long, just in case. And I kept looking behind me as I walked down that infamous lane out of the village, because blood sticks.I can trace my roots back no further than this small village in north west Essex, which I guess makes me an Essex boy at heart. If you've ever driven up the M11 from London to Cambridge you'll have passed within a whisker of here, halfway up that 15 mile stretch where there aren't any junctions. Newport is one of those almost-pretty East Anglian villages with quaint pastel-painted cottages lining the high street. To its credit, much of the 21st century has been held at bay and a surprising amount of the 18th (or even 17th) century remains. My grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's grandfather might even recognise some of that today. He was born and died in the village, and he's buried somewhere in the churchyard (although I couldn't identify which crumbling gravestone might be his when I stopped by for a visit). Edward married wife Martha in 1741 and she gave birth to three sons, one of them suspiciously close to the wedding day. I was dead chuffed to discover that the cottage to the right of this photo still bears the family name. There's no guarantee that any of my ancestors ever lived in this old farmhouse, admittedly, but at least I can now imagine them all growing up here, with the waters of the River Cam trickling slowly by at the bottom of the garden. An excellent place to have one's roots.
